Running Ubuntu 8.04 (beta) at Work

As an experiment today I tried installing the Ubuntu 8.04 beta on my work PC. I work for a very large commercial company and don’t personally know of anyone who has tried such a thing before, so I thought I might as well give it a go.

Here are some highlights of the 5 or 6 hours I spent on this today:-

Dual Screen

Most of my time was spent mucking about trying to get my dual screens setup to work. Something that is supposed to be easier in 8.04.

Ubuntu detected my video card fine (an on-board Intel 945G, quite standard for a work PC) and initially set me up with one monitor fine. Screen redraws were fast and Compiz was running pretty well.

But both monitors were showing the same image…

So I jumped to the new 8.04 Screen Resolution dialog and had a looksy. Sure enough it thought I had 2 monitors. It had also correctly decided that 1600×1200 was the resolution of choice. But where was the option to run a second desktop on screen #2?

As of 7.3, X.Org decides to wherever possible keep your xorg.conf brief. So much so that if you are having display issues the recommendation is to delete your xorg.conf file and restart X. Wow. The only downside being if you want to tweak just one parameter, erm, how do you do that?

XRandR, or X Resize and Rotate, replaces a plethora of dynamic display utilities and basically does just resize and rotate your X display or displays.

Right. So what about that Screen and Graphics dialog from Gutsy, aka displayconfig-gtk? It used to allow me to configure multiple displays the way I wanted. Oddly it’s now in the menus under Applications->Other. It’s an Application now? (Looks like this has since been removed – there’s now no menu item for it at all!)

Right anyway, so I trundled through and configured my screens using displayconfig-gtk, hit the Test button and wow, what an ugly garbled display I had on screen #1 and screen #2 just went black.

Fiddled with the settings some more and managed to get screen #1 looking okay but nothing on screen #2.

Reset my xorg.conf back to default.

Read somewhere that adding

SubSection "Display"
Virtual 3200 1200
EndSubSection

should solve the problem (3200×1200 being the bounding box resolution of my 2 screens).

It worked! But screen draws were reeealllyyy sllloooww.

A quick scan through the xorg log file and hmm, this message

Cannot support DRI with frame buffer width > 2048

In other words, the driver was telling me my virtual desktop size (3200 pixels wide) was too big for the hardware to support. Odd, I’ve had this working before I thought.

…hardware does not support unlimited coordinates. For instance, Intel boards up to i945 only support 2048 pixels in each direction. If you enable a larger virtual screen, DRI will be disabled and some problems may appear.

In other words: Even if your hardware is capable of handling two high-res displays, XRandR won’t be your friend unless your hardware is equally capable of running a single reallyreally high-res display. For this reason I must say that I don’t think XRandR is ready for the big time and Ubuntu in some cases needs to know to fall back to other technologies.

Email

To be honest I’d never tried connecting a Linux box to an Exchange server before so really didn’t know what I was in for on this one.

A few things I learned quickly about Evolution mail:

Exchange must be configured for web access (webmail) for Evolution to talk to it with all the features you would hope for. My email server wasn’t, or at least not openly

Failing that, IMAP/SMTP is your only option, which means no calendar and no address book. Using a work mail system day in day out without a calendar or address book is simply impossible

Evolution can be hard on the eyes! After about 20 minutes using it the whole screen started to look blurry. Maybe it just takes some getting used to?

Other than that, Evolution did crash on me once and also at one point I had to delete my configuration and start over to get it to connect to my mail server. D’oh!

Eclipse

Ah Eclipse, my favourite IDE. And oh so wonderful cross-platform(-ish)ness of Java, surely there will be good stories to tell my colleagues about running Eclipse on the latest and greatest Linux distro?

Actually, yes and no.

Yes –

disk access times in Windows are so poor (what is it about NTFS and small files?) that Eclipse ran frighteningly fast by comparison on Linux. Although the virus scanner in Windows probably has a lot to do with performance.

Still, it was really really fast, yippee!!

And No –

Eclipse 3.2?! Still?! Come on Ubuntu/Debian, what’s the hold-up??

The Subversive update site complains you’re running the wrong operating system unless you tick precisely the right boxes.

One in-house Eclipse plug-in failed to run. I suppose we can take the blame for that one though 😉

On the whole though Eclipse ran pretty well and I do hope to spend some time coding in Linux. Even if I have to go out and install 3.3 without the help of apt-get!

Conclusion

Almost a day’s effort and I am saddened that I don’t really have a machine I can do my day to day work on.

Generally I found today that to get a lot of tasks done I still needed to jump to the command-line or examine/edit cryptic files. In fact, outside of perhaps Eclipse, I hardly used a GUI configuration tool to good effect.

I love Ubuntu, I love Linux and I certainly love running Ubuntu Linux at home. But today’s experiment did make me wonder whether the OS and Gnome are yet mature enough for corporate environments.

Ready for primtime? I too love Ubuntu, but this LTS version is just awful so far.

There are literally DOZENS of bugs in the SMB, all relating to the switch to GVFS from GnomeVFS. So any drive that has credentialled access AND anonymous access (you know, you get read-only access without a password, read/write with password) is not accessible at all.

That is a bug that should never have been missed. And if you read a bit, you see it was reported in early March. And still remains outstanding.

So here I sit, with Network-Attached storage, a fancy new Heron box, and No flipping way to get to my data. Ok, I found a back door to get to it, but I can’t mount it, and I certainly can’t point my webserver to host off it….